When Donald J Trump entered politics in 2015, the RNC club -then headed by Reince Priebus- was dismissive. The RNC club was/is an echo-chamber of big donor and corporate influence. However, the blue-collar message carried by Donald Trump resonated with middle-America. The forgotten men, women and families responded in more ways than the immediate (and never diminishing) first place in the polls, they opened their checkbooks.
The scale of response from the MAGA supporters was unknown to the Club during their early 2016 efforts to position, Rubio, Cruz and eventually Kasich to take down the crass vulgarian. However, despite the Club’s earnest efforts, Donald Trump was indefatigable and his supporters were unfazed by the corporate media attacks.

If any issue ever highlighted the disconnect between the RNC club and the base of voters they claimed to represent, the campaign support for Donald Trump and the America-First agenda was a case study.
Then something happened…. in March and April of 2016, the club began having to accept that Donald Trump was going to be the nominee. The people behind MAGA were not going to leave him.
As a result of the Republican club’s terms and conditions, the RNC President, Reince Priebus, got his first look at the Trump campaign books. For the first time, the RNC president saw the number of people who contributed to the campaign account of Donald Trump. That was the club inflection point.
The RNC had never seen the number of donations, small donations, for a single presidential candidate, ever. The most shocking statistic was not the amount of money raised by Trump, but the sheer number of donors supporting him. Trump’s MAGA donor base file became the most valuable commodity the RNC club had ever seen.
The vast majority of these small donors had never appeared on any donor filings before. These were the hidden voters, the monster voters, the people who never previously engaged in politics or financially supported a political candidate before.
THESE were the MAGA voters. These were the millions of previously invisible middle-Americans who finally had someone they could support. They finally had a candidate who was talking about their issues, the issues of the working class.
(more…)